In recent years, because of the emergence of cloud computing and the like, scenes of utilizing a great number of computer resources have been increasing. For example, in a system for realizing cloud computing, there are a plurality of clusters each composed of a plurality of computers (nodes), forming extremely large cluster groups. However, in such situations, although the number of the existing nodes is from thousands to hundreds of thousands, how to construct and manage those nodes still remains a problem.
Here, there are generally one master node and a plurality of cluster nodes in one cluster. Then, since communications between a master node and cluster nodes are commonly carried out on a one-to-one basis, if the master node is to make a request to N cluster nodes, it needs to carry out a request process N times. Hence, increase in the number of cluster nodes results in increase in the same number of the processes carried out by the master node. This brings about a problem that the load on the master node becomes heavy along with the increased number of cluster nodes and, furthermore, it takes more time to transmit the request to all cluster nodes.
Here, the following Patent Document 1 discloses a technique related to an information processing system including a plurality of nodes. In this Patent Document 1, among a plurality of computers connected on a network, if any problem occurs when one monitoring master is carrying out health check on another computer, then the other computer starts the health check on computers of the health check objects of the monitoring master by referring to a management table taken over from the monitoring master and, at the same time, sends the computers a notification of changing the monitoring master. Then, the disclosed technique also shows that each computer on the network carries out the notification of changing the monitoring master in a relaying manner to the computers of the health check objects.
[Patent Document 1] JP 2000-10949 A
However, in the technique described above, when the number of computers is large, there still remains a problem of time increasing for carrying out the notification in a relaying manner. That is, it brings about a problem of taking much time for managing the whole system.